


White Rabbit

by indiachick



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 10x03, Demon Dean Winchester, Gen, uh....really weird
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-30
Updated: 2014-11-30
Packaged: 2018-02-27 14:48:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2696894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indiachick/pseuds/indiachick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>there are monsters in the bunker's dungeon</p>
            </blockquote>





	White Rabbit

He’s not feeling well.

It’s a quiet, creeping sensation that crawls over the stone and wraps itself around his neck. He watches it come: past the shackles and the handcuffs, and the shadow of the ceiling’s Devil’s Trap. It’s got teeth. It feels like a haunting. Dean tries to shake it off. He calls for Sam, but not in any civil language, and Sam doesn’t show. He tells Sam what he’s going to do to him, when he breaks free of this box. He doesn’t know what part of  that  pie-chart is a lie.

Maybe all of it.

Maybe, he thinks,  maybe he could lure Sam. On any day now, Sam is a dying man who’ll clutch at a straw which Dean offers. On any day he’s just so  Sam. Forever solvable. Easy little algorithm. All his variables out of place, skewed madly out of proportion, and they all made him like that. All the demons and humans and angels walking all over neat, binary, simple little-brother Sam. Dean didn’t see that before, but that’s what being a demon does to you. Gives you—

“Perspective,” Dean yells. Laughs, because it honestly  is funny: how Sam’s a special snowflake getting trampled again and again and again. Something shatters upstairs, which only makes it funnier. 

So maybe the luring part is not really going to fly for Dean.

Dean is not feeling well. It’s like a stabbing pain at his temple, or, or, a spike in his chest, or, the worst, the tiniest nagging little thing spilling red beneath his eyelids. Like something saying  remember. It’s like a thorn in his eye, a stitch in his heart, a sprain in his tongue. It’s like that hitch in the loud songs he sings to freak Sammy out, that pause in the pace he keeps to menace him, that sliver of madness in which he forgets his name.  Dean.  His name is Dean. And he’s in this little metal box at the bottom of a secret little bunker, how fucking quaint. 

(Let’s break down the door, Dean-o. )

Only, he’s not feeling well.

Dean’s calling it the  White Rabbit , because he believes in themes. His own monster. The psychic version of a Jefferson Starship, and just as moronically trippy. It’s stronger on certain sides of the room—a sudden dizziness, a hot flare of pain in his arm, a flash of pink. On one wall it’s weaker, just a steady buzz in his head like vespids. It’s a cramped space, behind a Devil’s Trap and several other contraptions, and getting there is hard work. It’s cold comfort getting there anyway: because look how far he’s come from freedom— pressed up against a cold wall in a quiet dark room. No beer, no entertainment, just darkness and damage. He wishes Sam would just chain him up in that old chair again, so Dean didn’t have to look for  spots.  So Dean didn’t have to keep moving around the room to keep the monster at bay. So Dean didn’t have to fit all of himself in that small space where the world spins round and round and he wants to scream. That small space where things seem frighteningly real, and frighteningly  human.  He wishes Sam would get rid of that space, remind him of who he is, strap him back on the fucking chair—

—but Sam does nothing. 

(Sam is either not here at all, or has an exacting case of  Paint it Black, which is not as bad as the  White Rabbit, but exhausting just the same. Sam is reserved. Sam is sad. Sam is starved. And his monster is such that even if he cries, no one is permitted to see.)

Inside the little tinder-box, time passes in boring little shudders. Blink, and it’s a second. Blink again—oops, sorry, still the same second. Through the space beneath the bookshelves that lead to freedom, the light spins in a never-ending cycle of black-pink-black. The siren never shuts up. It’s the spectrum and tocsin of danger, a powder-keg stage, meant to be temporary. 

The lock-down alert. 

It never stops.

Dean doesn’t sleep, because sleeping births a whole new monster. This is the  Paranoid Android  monster, which is when the thoughts and memories and the insides of your skull spin at a variable velocity while the rest of you stays inertially at rest. It induces a strange sort of vertigo, precarious as glass. Make note: this is the same kind of crawling, swinging thing that set things a-spin back at Lester’s. Back when he killed the client. Back when Dean let Cole live. What Crowley might call  empathy. What Dean will call  feeling sorry for the poor bastards.  What Sam will simply call  Dean.

Just exaggerated this time. Worsened: maybe by the bunker, maybe by something else. 

Something to be remembered.

A strange monster, this—a loss of stability, a feeling like the insides of him are spinning in endless rotation while remaining frustratingly fixed within his body. Fixed, or maybe  trapped . Splitting headaches— violent, lancing through his skull. Pressure on the carotid. A terrible coldness inside, putting its weighted feet on every vertebra. Savage. Abrupt. Pain like bee stings; like wood-chippers. 

Pain like cleaving. 

Like loss.

Like  this , like  that ; but nothing, really, like anything. 

(Luckily, it passes if you pinch your eyes shut and squint. Don’t look at anything right, and lie to yourself. That blessed blood congealing in the box from St. Agatha’s is not salvation, but danger. That door leading outside is not open, but locked. That one-winged brother of yours is—)

#

Sometimes Dean wants to give in to the  Hey, Jude monster. The one that says everything can be made better.

It’s got teeth and tongue and salty barbs that lash at cool pragmatic reason. It tells him,  don’t be afraid. It tastes like either blood or memory, and Dean can’t tell the difference. It crawls up his spine whispering about how hiding will only make it all worse, so much worse. 

(Hey, Sammy. You’re making it so much worse for yourself, man.)

The  Hey, Jude  monster leads him to pick up a syringe himself, and his hands shake when he fills it. The blood is thick as tar. It will jam in his veins, curdle in his heart. 

It will hurt.

When Dean looks up and towards the entrance, Sam is watching him quietly. The lights flash black-pink-black behind him, and his sling is gone.  Looking better, Dean wants to say. The words jam too. Somewhere inside his chest. 

Dean puts the needle back, watches his reflection on a metal table. It’s harder to keep his eyes black now. It causes a fullness and a heaviness in his forehead; distorts his vision so he has to look around at Sam through a glossy headache. Sam splits into jerky panels as if in a zoopraxiscope. All the different Sams watch him. Dean blinks and they coalesce; just one Sam with messy hair and lost, confused eyes. 

A thin trickle of blood runs down his nostril, pools above his lip and drips in a straight unbroken line down his chin. Sam doesn’t seem to notice.

#

The monsters of nostalgia are wide and varied and sneak upon Dean at random intervals.

Hey, Sammy, he says to a floppy-haired, little-boy Sam peeking at him from over the front seat of the Impala.  Hey, to a Sam bathed in the red light from some highway, sitting on the concrete base of a gasoline pump while Dean fills the car.  Hey, to an exhausted Sam sleeping on the table here at the bunker, hand still curled around an uncapped pen. 

The monsters of nostalgia are such that they lower your inhibitions, much like liquor used to. The monsters of nostalgia make you want to revisit places and people. Not what hunters are used to, and not something allowed them, but they’ve never played by the rules now, the Winchesters, have they?

The door is not locked. The bookshelves swing forward easily, and Dean knew that. 

He never shut them after himself. He knows that.

He climbs up the stairs, heavy with that knowledge.

The  Purple Haze is a monster that makes you think you’re going one way, when in reality you’re going in the other direction. You’re so sure you’re walking towards the library— towards the library and the stairs and the door out of here— but instead you end up pushing the door open to a bathroom.

The water’s running, steam thick and fogging up the mirror. The shower cubicle is an ice-block of frosted glass, nothing visible except for fog. All the tiles are bright white and ridiculously sterile, and all that whiteness is shock, is horror, and Dean has to blink and blink, until he’s not sure if his own eyes have been bleached off all color. He takes one step closer to the mirror and there’s Sam, naked to the waist, ill-fitting jeans dangling over the sharp cut of his hips. His sudden and painful thinness seem even more pronounced in the harsh, garish white light. It glances off his shoulder bones, pools silver in the hollows of his ribcage.

Dean swallows around the pain in his head, constant now, expansive like a living thing is prowling within his skull, or perhaps above it, so all of him could crumble in a fragile eggshell implosion anytime.

“Sam?”

Sam turns his head slowly to look at him, and in this light, terrible and unforgiving, he’s the most beautiful thing Dean’s ever seen or dreamt. And in that moment, Dean does another thing that’s not very demon: he  hopes.

“Sammy?”

Something is stuck on the mirror, and Dean has to squint again to see, but he would have guessed—would have guessed  right that it’s the note he wrote, all those months before:  Sammy Let Me Go .

There’s a sudden, staccato pop as the bulb above the sink shatters, all that white light snuffed in one go. Dean does what he’s always wont to do when things are strange and the lights go out—he grabs for Sam, to keep him close, keep a hand on him so nothing snatches him off, so nothing can hurt him. His balance gets overcompensated with the move and he goes down, hard on one knee, and Sam comes with him, quietly. In the resulting semi-dark, the bathroom is just a normal space again, nothing frightening about it. The tap still runs somewhere, dripping loudly, and Sam’s skin is so cold it hurts to touch. Cold rolls off him in waves, like the inversion of a fever. Dean holds onto him, brushes gently at the waves of soft hair at the base of Sam’s neck, damp and matted with blood. His fingers slide slick over Sam’s shoulders, trails hesitantly down his spine, and it feels like the more he touches Sam, the bloodier his fingers get, the wetter. The wetness runs down his wrist, serpentines down his arm. 

“I am not letting you go,” Sam tells him, very clearly. Tiny rivulets of blood run into his mouth, but he doesn’t care, a secret sliver of a smile tugging at his lips when he says: “You know that.”

“All right,” Dean says on a sharp inhale, and everything smells like soap and damp and iron in here, and no blood. “Okay, Sammy.”

Dean doesn’t look at the mirror. That living thing goes swinging inside his skull with an ax, and he closes his eyes, both to get away from it and the mirror right in front of him, where he will be alone. 

He only swung the hammer once.

 


End file.
